If you take a look at the bandwidth limitations of 144 MHz, you'll see why the high-speed data isn't suitable for that band. 440 MHz can do a little better, but you have to head to 1.2 before you can get much. And that's pretty much the same as any other service. Anything below 900 MHz is considered prime territory and bandwidths aren't allow to get too big.
I'm in an area which is pretty much out of 146 MHz bandwidth, pretty close to out on 440, and even 1.2 is filling up. If you are after high-speed data transfer, then the 802.11bg services are your best bet. They are in high production and therefore low cost. But if you want the widest spread implementation of digital voice and/or data in Amateur Radio, then you're looking at D-STAR. BTW, 1200 bps data transfer is far from useless. Texting is probably one of the most used data transfers in the world and it fits quite well into 1200 bps. Ed WA4YIH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 1:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: DStar uses I tend to go along with Ken's thinking. The overall D-Star isn't all that impressive to me. Mainly because of that utterly useless data throughput. 1200 baud was useful in the 1980's.. been there, done that with packet. I've played with the 1.2 GHz ID-1 (the only D-Star radio) that provides a decent data throughput. Overall I'm not impressed with it's performance and price. As pointed out the real hindrance is the 6.25 KHz narrow bandwidth design of D-Star. A dirty shame since we have tons of bandspace, so I really don't see the need for narrow band in amateur radio. While overall it's a disappointment, D-Star is something new to mess with, so I will. --- In [email protected]<mailto:dstar_digital%40yahoogroups.com>, "John D. Hays" <j...@...> wrote: > > This is really a question of bandwidth. The D-STAR Digital Voice system [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
